Thurnip's paintings and stuff

Nice start, i'm not that good with concep art but i think it lacks some depth and materials. You should try to download some cool brushes that have some patterns in !

Looks great. The painting style reminds me of something but I cant put my finger on it.

My main suggestion would to be too add more turbidity to the second wave of water because the front portion looks a little flat.

A few things:

The color of the ice wall compared to the rest is unnatural. Desaturate it so it fits with the other colors in the image

The clouds look very peaceful and not very menacing - you can make the fog and the clouds merge to become more of this mistful/mysterious entity.

The edge of the wall needs to be more jagged and sharp. The wall is a dangerous object, make it look dangerous by adding unappealing shapes associated with danger.

This will greatly help your composition and make it seem more like the dangerous place the original presents it to be.

A final point would be to make the ship look like its closer to the wall (once again, emphasize the danger).

i think the problem with the blue is that it looks painted on, rather than a product of light refracting around inside of it. you could get away with the saturation if you could get that otherworldly effect out of it.

I really like your paiting Thurnip. I agree with some of the previous comments, especially the ice-blue looks to be from an highlight marker. But picking it up just as an exercise, it really has the same atmosphere of the original picture... read: not everything should necessary be dangerous to look good (so long that in Feng Zhu design school they forbid the drawing of guns, except when explicitly assigned – "it's easy to make something look good with guns on it").

Same for texture and materials, how realistic the painting must be depends on the target, imo (ie: stylized game vs realistic). Also, details can always been added, another tip from Feng is "the painting must always be in a deliverable state (so don't spend all your time in detailing just one area)".

In conclusion, i think it would really be great exercise to take this stage and see how can you turn it in a different scene from the one in the original pic, so like Sentura says, making it menacing.

I didn't mean it should look dangerous to look GOOD, I meant it should look dangerous because that's what the aim of the image is. Having something look dangerous just because people think dangerous looks "good" is a terrible thought. You want to emphasize the properties of whatever you are painting to the point where they create an effect. More than 50% of the canvas real estate is taken up by the ice wall, which shows it is massive - and judging by the proximity and size of the ship in contrast, it creates the dynamic of imminent danger for the ship crashing into the wall. So if you use round or soft shapes for the edge of the wall, it will counter this, because then people are more likely to think of it as a nonthreatening surface.

I'm currently writing about art and use of art components in this sense (among other things), and in the interesting design resources thread there is a link to the principles of neuroaesthetics, which I have been using as one of the main sources of inspiration and theory. I suggest you take a look at it.

Quote from Sentura

in the interesting design resources thread there is a link to the principles of neuroaesthetics, which I have been using as one of the main sources of inspiration and theory. I suggest you take a look at it.

I've downloaded a couple of pdfs from there, haven't read any of the material provided... it's in the reading list btw!

Thanks for the heads up.

Anyways, I completely agree on the theory you explained... it's just I disagree about the aim of the painting. I mean, how do you know? There's no assignment or brief shared by Thurnip; the picture doesn't transmit danger to me, as an exercise it seems a good reproduction of the original. Sure, if he said "i wanted to render a dangerous scene" i would totally agree with you!

I wasn't referring to Thurnip's recreation, I was referring to the original. But even so, looking at the original image, was your thought ever that it was supposed to be a peaceful image?

As far as copying the reference and looking the part, it's pretty accurate. Something I would probably have considered would be the holes in the bridge railing, but that's nitpicking really.

My personal opinion is that with landscape pieces like these you usually want some strong focus on a particular contrast - something that is interesting. The photo makes this happen with the overexposure of lights on a road, but that doesn't translate well into a painting. Maybe you could improvise and making something interesting happen on the road?

On the last one, what Sentura said. Add for example a checkpoint, do you remember those sentinel towers in HL2? Or maybe add a bottom part and have an airplane/spaceship passing underneath. Etc.

Without color is totally unclear the scene is populated, those car lights look like snow to me.

Quote from Sentura

I wasn't referring to Thurnip's recreation, I was referring to the original. But even so, looking at the original image, was your thought ever that it was supposed to be a peaceful image?

Thurnip answered already and i agree with him. I don't want to appear like those who contradict for the sake of it, but to me the iceberg picture looks "breathtaking", which doesn't mean scary nor peaceful. I dunno, it is maybe because I know everything's fine, because you don't get that close if you are not sure you are safe... i was in similar situations: sailing that close to huge rock cliffs (i've been lucky enough to navigate a huge chunk of the Mediterranean coast with my parents during summer vacation on our small boat ).

Quote from Thurnip

cincinnati maybe...... i should saturate all the comp around, or desaturate the ice. The main problem is that it's not fitting, right?

That's it. I'm not planning to come back too much on the same comp. [...]

I think it's totally fine to work on as many pieces... the important thing is to learn something every time. There was another concept I found original and important watching a tutorial one time: you don't have to get attached to your stuff, the guy showed that after making a complex study... he deleted the file.

As per the saturation argument (a) looks perfect for a glacier scene (b) ties well in another tip from, sorry i'm a broken record, Feng: he shows that he uses a white layer in "Luminosity" to switch to a grayscale painting to always keep values to the right amount, making sure things are lit properly. And that's a general principle, i have used it for blocking out a website, a teacher I got suggested to do so. You can even work in greyscale and then color the thing.

If you have some time to spare, i really suggest you to follow FZDSchool YT channel and watch the earlier lessons because these concepts are repeated over and over, while seeing a professional work and explain many different techniques.

Quote from Thurnip

(oh! and... when i was planting the tanks, i remembered about Fang zu and how i was using guns to make the stuff look cool hahah)

Eheh

(but that's a tip referring in particular at character/vehicle design )

I like your workflow, it's a great way to do details right. I don't really have any critiques for it, but maybe you should try painting at a bigger resolution? One of the things I discovered was that doing things at higher resolution let me have more precision for brush strokes and generally left paintings look better.

good studies, thur!

about the last image, imo the circle things on the right pop out too much. Maybe they are too bright and/ or too sharp in comparison with the rest of the image. I would lower them a little and see if it improves.

The atmospheric effects definitely helped!

gj, keep up.